Today’s Top Reads: Last-Ditch Effort for Fiscal Cliff Deal

News Editor

Fiscal cliff talks resume as clock ticks. We’re entering the final throes of the fiscal cliff talks. Congressional leaders head to the White House for negotiations this afternoon and the House will come back into session on Sunday night — which could allow lawmakers to vote Sunday or Monday on a deal — if one can be put together, the Hill reports.

Republican aides tell the Washington Post that one option that could potentially win broad support is allowing taxes to rise on household income over $400,000 a year — President Obama’s latest offer in negotiations with House Speaker John Boehner — rather than the president’s preferred threshold of $250,000 a year.

But the chances of such a deal getting enough Republican support to win passage in the House appear slim. Boehner told House Republicans that he’s “not interested” in passing a fiscal cliff deal with “mostly Democrat votes,” his most direct comments about how he’ll manage the remaining negotiations over tax increases and spending cuts, Politico says. And Roll Call says lawmakers are “as pessimistic as ever about averting the fiscal cliff.”

Meanwhile, we’re seeing more signs that the fiscal cliff impasse is taking a toll on economic growth. The Conference Board’s consumer confidence index fell to 65.1 in December from 71.5 in November – a much bigger drop than economists expected. “Expectations have certainly shifted and it seems like consumer attitudes have caught up with business confidence,” Michael Griffin, executive director at Corporate Executive Board, tells the NYT. Surveys by the group have shown business sentiment weakening for three consecutive quarters, he said.

Retailers ramp-up same-day delivery push. Online retailers have been ramping up same-day shipping this holiday season – despite the fact that it’s logistically complicated, generally unprofitable and may not even be a service that many consumers want. But fear of Amazon is driving companies to experiment with a service idea that was a spectacular failure during the dot.com boom, when companies like Kozmo.com and Webvan went under because the services simply cost too much to be profitable, write the NYT’s Stephanie Clifford and Claire Cain Miller. Amazon has offered same-day shipping since 2009 in cities near Amazon warehouses. Other companies are trying different approaches. The eBay Now iPhone app lets customers choose items from physical stores and eBay sends a courier to the store to pick it up and drop it off for a $5 fee. EBay won’t say whether it loses money on the orders, but analysts doubt it’s profitable, Clifford and Miller say.

Chesapeake faces uncertain future.Reuters wraps up its aggressive coverage of Chesapeake Energy with a look at the fading fortunes of CEO Aubrey McClendon. Over the course of the year, the company’s stock price has dropped nearly 30%, the board stripped McClendon of his chairmanship and his estimated billion-dollar personal fortune has shrunk by more than half, write Brian Grow, Anna Driver and Joshua Schneyer. With corporate, state and federal probes into McClendon and the company set to continue, 2013 isn’t looking any easier.

Meanwhile, Chesapeake’s cash crunch, “like McClendon’s, is rippling through the company’s operations.” Charles Joyce, president of Otis Eastern, says he’ll never do business with Chesapeake again. Otis is suing Chesapeake after it says the company fell behind paying its bills. “The impression you get is that Chesapeake slow-walks payments to its vendors,” J.P. Morgan oil and gas analyst Joseph Allman says.

Nearly across the board, mid-market executives are hiring new employees, buying new technology solutions, acquiring businesses to reach new markets and preparing IPOs, according to a Deloitte survey of more than 500 mid-market executives. But companies are running up against a number of constraints as they seek to expand, particularly in acquiring and retaining skilled talent.